Steven Wilson: Roger Waters Is Arguably the Worst Musician in Pink Floyd

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Steven Wilson: Roger Waters Is Arguably the Worst Musician in Pink Floyd, Yet He's Behind Most of Their Groundbreaking Music

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/ge ... music.html

"Great musicians are people who are brilliant musical thinkers."

[twcc]

^^^
It was a crazy article in 2017 and remains so today ...

[Yucateco]

I would give the honor of worst musician in Pink Floyd to Nick Mason but ok.

[Alvader]

Steven Wilson: Roger Waters Is Arguably the Worst Musician in Pink Floyd, Yet He's Behind Most of Their Groundbreaking Music

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/ge ... music.html

"Great musicians are people who are brilliant musical thinkers."

I would not say "...Yet he is behind most of their groundbreaking music" but rather "groundbreaking Albums". Waters is behind the concepts of those albums. The music is made by the group. The result is a Pink Floyd album.

[Annoying Twit]

I would not say "...Yet he is behind most of their groundbreaking music" but rather "groundbreaking Albums". Waters is behind the concepts of those albums. The music is made by the group. The result is a Pink Floyd album.

I agree, and I'm sure many other people will as well. Roger was the lyrical genius of the band, but the others provided vital parts of the recipe that made Pink Floyd.

[ZiggyZipgun]

I would not say "...Yet he is behind most of their groundbreaking music" but rather "groundbreaking Albums". Waters is behind the concepts of those albums. The music is made by the group. The result is a Pink Floyd album.

I agree, and I'm sure many other people will as well. Roger was the lyrical genius of the band, but the others provided vital parts of the recipe that made Pink Floyd.

I'd just like to speculate that the recipe for the classic Floyd albums calls for Roger's writing, circa the 1970s. 99% of Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals are written in second-person point of view, where the listener is addressed as the main character. The Wall and The Final Cut jump around from first-person to second-person, but the better moments are in second-person, or the few places where it sets the scene in second-person, and Gilmour chimes in, now in first-person - "Mother", "Young Lust", "Comfortably Numb" - in "Dogs", it's Roger singing in first-person, before launching into his rendition of "Howl". A lot of Roger's early stuff was in third-person, but "Embryo", "Biding My Time", "Grandchester Meadows", "If", and all of Meddle is first-person, though much less specific than The Wall and everything after it; Pros and Cons is entirely first-person and (I would say) painfully specific. "Cymbaline", and Gilmour's "The Narrow Way" and "Childhood's End" are also in second-person. Pink Floyd's best work uses very vivid music while lyrically leaving enough room for the listener's imagination, allowing them to assume the role of the main character. Roger's later work isn't nearly as identifiable for most people - he certainly honed his ability to tell a story, and there are morals to those stories, but most of them take multiple listens to piece together, unlike the immediacy of hearing Dark Side of the Moon for the first time. I really don't think the latter-day Floyd would have been better with Roger's involvement, because he didn't write like that anymore.

[Annoying Twit]

I can't imagine there being a latter day Floyd with Rog's involvement. I think that if Rog had stayed with Floyd, it would only because the others would have been sidelined and potentially ejected over time. So, it would have been Rog's solo albums, except that they would have been labelled Pink Floyd rather than Roger Waters.

[moodyblue]

I would give the honor of worst musician in Pink Floyd to Nick Mason but ok.

It's a hard one as to which one is worse. Nick certainly talks a good album that's for sure.

I was always curious as to why Jeff Porcaro was drafted in to play on The Wall album simply because Nick couldn't do the job required. Did he never think to practise? Was he simply not interested in developing as a musician?
I like what Nick did in Floyd be it the 'Saucerful' drum pattern, the acoustic drums on 'Time' or the slow groove on 'Set The Controls'. But to go all that time and not develop as a musician by learning different time patterns is a bit mystifying.

[pinkyblue123]

Is that Kevin Bloody Wilson's brother????

[ZiggyZipgun]

But to go all that time and not develop as a musician by learning different time patterns is a bit mystifying.

I think the same is true for Rick and Roger. Rick certainly applied himself in the late '60s, as heard in things like "Love Scene (Version 4)" from Zabriskie Point, and the Farfisa/Binson solo in "Set the Controls" from Pompeii; he also adopted new instruments, like the clavinet and polyphonic synths when they came along, but really never played anything more complex than what he was doing in 1969 (in '74 he said he felt more motivated to "jump on my lawnmower and shoot 'round the garden").

Nick was heavily influenced by Ginger Baker, and certainly played more wildly in the '60s than in '70s and beyond. I think that as they shed the psychedelic improvisation and focused on accomplishing more with fairly sparse instrumentation, Nick felt very comfortable with his playing, and it suited what they were doing. Once Roger started writing music, which didn't happen much before The Wall, the chord progressions were simpler but the time signatures were sometimes odd, just like on "Money" - he wasn't trying to write it in 7/8, it just came out that way and he ran with it. Plus, during The Wall sessions, they were in such a hurry that they had no qualms ringing up a session musician if they were taking too long to get a good take. (Jeff Porcaro only played on "Mother", but he did play drums on all of About Face. Andy Newmark played on "Two Suns in the Sunset" for the same reason, and then played on all of The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking.)

Roger has admitted he had no interest in playing instruments, and in early performances of the "The Great Gig in the Sky", he just played this mostly chromatic, descending bass line that really didn't fit the chord progression, which suggests that, at least at that point, having played guitar and bass for roughly ten years, his knowledge was still limited to the pentatonic scale.

David, on the other hand, seemed to delve into something different every few years - lap steel and fretless bass in 1970, alternate tunings in '71, the EMS guitar synth in '72, pedal steel in '74 (as heard on a lot of Unicorn songs), alternate scales in '76, and he has said he spent a lot of time in '78 trying to improve his playing, particularly his speed - all the while devising and maintaining an ever-changing signal path as his sound evolved. Later on, he continued to improve his finger-picking, for songs like "Poles Apart" - then took up the saxophone while his son was learning it in school.

Dave has said that he and Syd learned guitar together, including some bottleneck (or in Syd's case, Zippo) slide guitar, though Syd's output indicates he spent more time exploring different effects units than learning conventional theory. In 1971, Syd said "Hendrix was a perfect guitarist. And that’s all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way. It’s always been too slow for me. Playing. The pace of things. I mean, I’m a fast sprinter. The trouble was, after playing in the group for a few months, I couldn’t reach that point." During the same interview, he showed off his new Yamaha 12-string acoustic, and mentioned that he "never felt so close to a guitar as that silver one with mirrors that I used on stage all the time."

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... and not develop as a musician by learning different time patterns is a bit mystifying.

Have you ever wondered why Pink Floyd uses so many different sound effects in their music and on their albums? Some critics of the band are of the opinion Pink Floyd has 'masked' their average musical abilities with a lot of special efects.. And, at the same time a special efects made a music of the band far more interesting and attractive than it actually is. Pink Floyd as a band were certainly the Rock music greatest experimentators. From the early feedback and electronic drums experimentation to the mad laughters and ticking clocks on Dark Side to the shiver-sending spooky atmosphere of The Wall, they were always a impeccable masters of special effects. And it was certainly that side of them that attracted most of the bamd's audience.

[ZiggyZipgun]

Some critics of the band are of the opinion Pink Floyd has 'masked' their average musical abilities with a lot of special efects..

[Annoying Twit]

I was always curious as to why Jeff Porcaro was drafted in to play on The Wall album simply because Nick couldn't do the job required. Did he never think to practise? Was he simply not interested in developing as a musician?
I like what Nick did in Floyd be it the 'Saucerful' drum pattern, the acoustic drums on 'Time' or the slow groove on 'Set The Controls'. But to go all that time and not develop as a musician by learning different time patterns is a bit mystifying.

What I remember reading is that it was thought that Nick would be able to create a part for Mother, but that to do so would take a lot of time. They bought Porcaro in and he utterly nailed it straight off. So, it wasn't a situation where Nick couldn't have done it, but that they had an awful lot of album to get on and record, and this was by far the quickest solution.

Note that Nick learned to play the part live, so it's not that he didn't learn to play alternate time signatures.

We had this discussion before and we discussed Nick's work on the demo. People had different opinions, but my personal opinion was that Nick's arrangement for that song was actually poor, and he would have had to start again from scratch if they wanted anything good. And, what they got was excellent with Porcaro.

[ZiggyZipgun]

Have you ever wondered why Pink Floyd uses so many different sound effects in their music and on their albums?

While it's a stretch to say that the reason they used sound effects was to mask their musical abilities, I think it's fair to say that they (specifically Roger and Nick) spent a lot more time crafting those sound effects than they did practicing. But they're not

The band (including Syd) were big fans of John Cage:
I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the use of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored.
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effects, but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of anyone's imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heart beat, and landslide.
John Cage, 1937

I'm not sure what 'electronic drum experimentation' you're referring to. Nick did have a very primitive drum synth trigger pad in his kit during the 1972-73 tours, but it didn't make it onto any albums. The hi-hat sound of "On the Run" was part of the VCS3 patch, but that was very common for the Berlin-school/kosmiche musik artists who, at the very same time that Dark Side of the Moon was being made, were building an entire genre around exploring the possibilities of sequencing.

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The band hired also a session drummer Andy Newmark to play drums on 'Two Suns in the Sunset'. Nick was unable to perform the song, due to its complex time signature changes.